I was wondering what plus points to commend this book to the casual reader for. I came up with one simple answer. What reading this book means is that I can now understand the appeal of The Daily Mail without ever having to read it ever again-for that alone the book is to be praised.
I remember the campaign before the vote in June 2016 about whether the UK should remain in the European Union or whether the UK should leave. I remember the frenzied non-arguments and advertising this way and that, which was later proven to be over-budget and should have invalidated the vote. But the blown advertising budgets and false claims did nothing of the sort, even when they were later confirmed by BBC journalists. I remember the famous red bus emblazoned with how much more could be spent on the NHS if the UK left the EU. That bus was all over the media, and even then the leave plan, hidden from the public, was both for the UK to leave the EU and for the 'leave' government to stint on financing the NHS, like some secretive cheating and embezzling business partner.
I do not remember much of the narrative I was presented with prior to Brexit being the way Fintan O'Toole presents the arguments as here. I knew about how the English confuse reward with punishment in a version of sadism and masochism which they compound by denying that it is sadism and masochism. My memories of English sadism/masochism were very 1980s, where youths were expected to 'price themselves into work' but the work disappeared in front of them. There was nothing for them to 'price themselves' into/be paid less for. The jobs that anyone might be skilled up/trained to do disappeared into thin air, and a lot of unskilled work migrated to black economy which in theory did not exist-but everyone knew it did exist, and more that that it was a necessity that the black economy worked when the proper economy failed.
Forty years on and I have survived long term unemployment. The latest application of sadism/masochism became the UK vs the EU. It was as surprising as it was depressing when the chapter entitled 'The Charge of The Light Brigade' listed the many disasters that the English not only endured but multiplied the repercussions of by insisting that the original disaster could be overturned if the application of effort was great enough. I did wonder how much this was sadism/masochism and how much was not knowing when to stop flogging an idea past it's use by date. This in turn made me wonder whether the book was about trying to discover when Brexit was still in it's date, and what it's sell-by date used to be.
The book deals well with Boris Johnson the joker journalist who serially lied about the EU and when anyone quoted it to him or told him that it was a a lie and sacked him he said that they were fools if they ever took it seriously. Jacob Rees-Mogg and his cod-histories are also dispatched with confidence. O'Toole goes into the real Hundred year war (337-1453) and explains it's absurdities and vanities.
The afterword 'Amity Island' is a brilliant expose of the Boris Johnson method of majoritarianism, where if the suffering seems slight enough and few enough people suffer it then he is very happy and he knew how to convince everybody else to be happy. Dissecting that and the consequences of Brexit, where the United Kingdom is disunited and and disgruntled, and how the Tories reside over this disunity with promises that are inconsistent and incompatible with each other is oddly reassuring. If things seem bad then at least O'Toole exposes why. He is the first writer I have seen to explore the difference between England including London and England without London-something that forty years ago I would have said were vastly different but I would never have seen written about at the time.
Book title: 'Heroic Failure: Brexit and The Politics of Pain'
Author: Fintan O'Toole
Publisher: Head of Zeus/Apollo.
Updated version of the book released in 2021.
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